Struck with revulsion, she stumbled to her feet. With her heat gone the life forms dwindled back. The colours leached out of the lichen-like patches, and that single flower closed, as if regretfully.
‘A strange scene,’ said the silver ghost. ‘But it is a common tactic. The living things here must endure centuries in stillness and silence, waiting a chance benison of heat - from volcanic activity, perhaps even a cometary impact. And in those rare, precious moments, they live and die, propagate and breed. Perhaps they even dream of better times in the past.’
Though she had endured orientation exercises run by the Commission for Historical Truth, Minda had never encountered an alien before. She bunched her fists. ‘Are you a Qax?’
‘. . . No,’ it replied, after some hesitation. ‘Not a Qax.’
‘Then what?’
Again that hesitation. ‘Our kinds have never met before. You have no name for me. What are you?’
‘I’m a human being,’ she said defiantly. She pushed out her chest; her suit was emblazoned with a green tetrahedron. ‘And this is our planet. You’ll see, when we get it sorted out. These things, these flowers and worms, cannot compete with us.’
The ghost hovered, impassive. ‘Compete?’
She swivelled her head to confront the hovering ghost. ‘All life forms compete. It is the way of things.’ But it was as if her skull was full of a sloshing liquid; she felt herself stumbling forward.
‘Try to stay upright,’ the ghost said, its voice free of inflection. ‘Your insulation is imperfect. To reduce heat loss, you must minimise your surface contact with the ice.’
‘I don’t need your advice,’ she growled. But her breath was misting, and there were tiny frost patterns in the corners of her faceplate. The cold was sharp in her nose and mouth and eyes.
The ghost said, ‘Your body is a bag of liquid water. I surmise you come from a world of high ambient temperatures. I, however, come from a world of cold.’
‘Where?’
The hovering globe’s hide was featureless, but nevertheless she had the impression that it was spinning. ‘Towards the centre of the Galaxy.’ Something untranslatable. A distance? ‘And yours?’
She knew how to find the sun from here. Minda had travelled across a hundred and fifty light years, at the edge of the great colonising bubble called the Third Expansion, towards the brilliant young stars of Scorpio and the Southern Cross. Now those dazzling beacons were easily identifiable in the sky over her head, jewels thrown against the paler wash of the Galaxy centre. To find home, all she had to do was look the other way, back the way the great fleet of Spline ships had come. The sun, Earth and all the familiar planets were therefore somewhere beneath her feet, hidden by the bulk of this frozen rock.
She was never going to see Earth again, she thought suddenly, desolately; and because this ice-block world happened to be turned this way rather than that, she would never even see the dim, unremarkable patch of sky where Earth lay.
Without thinking, she found herself looking that way. She snapped her head up. ‘I mustn’t tell you.’
‘Ah. Competition?’
Was the ghost somehow mocking her? She said sharply, ‘If we have never met before, how come I understand you?’
‘Your vessel carries a translator box. The box understands both our languages. It is of Squeem design.’
Minda hadn’t even known her flitter was equipped with a translator box. ‘It’s a human design,’ she said.
‘No,’ the ghost said gently. ‘Squeem. We have never met before, but evidently the Squeem have met us both. Ironic. It is a strange example of inadvertent cooperation between three species: Squeem, your kind, mine.’
The Squeem were the first extra-solar species humanity had encountered. They were also the first to have occupied Sol system; the Qax, soon after, had been the second. Minda had grown up understanding that the universe was full of alien species hostile to humanity. She glanced around. Were there more silver ghosts out there, criss-crossing the silent plains, their perfect reflectiveness making them invisible to her untrained eye? She tried not to betray her fear.
She asked cautiously, ‘Are you alone?’
‘We have a large colony here.’ Again that odd hesitation. ‘But I, too, am stranded in this place. I came to investigate the city.’
‘And you were caught by the volcano?’
‘Yes. What is worse, my investigation did not advance the goals of the colony.’ She sensed it was studying her. ‘You are shivering. Do you understand why? Your body knows it is losing heat faster than it is being replaced. The shivering reflex exercises many muscles, increasing heat production by burning fuel. It is a short-term tactic, but—’
‘You know a lot about human bodies.’
‘No,’ it said. ‘I know a lot about heat. I am equipped to survive in this heat-sink landscape for extended periods. You, however, are not.’
It was as if cadre-leader Bryn was lecturing her on the endless struggle that was the only future for mankind. We cannot be weak. The Qax found us weak. They enslaved us and almost wiped our minds clean. If we are unfit for this new world, we must make ourselves fit. Whatever it takes. For only the fittest survive. If she let herself die before this enigmatic silver ghost, she would be conceding the new world to an alien race.
Impulsively, she began to stalk into the shallow valley, towards the antique city. Maybe there was something there she could use to signal, or survive.
The silver ghost followed her. It swam over the ground with a smooth, unnatural ease; it was a motion neither biological nor mechanical that she found disturbing.
She pushed through snowed-out air. The cold seemed to be settling in her lungs, and when she spoke her voice quavered from shivering.
‘Why are you here? What do you want on Snowball?’
‘We are’ - a hesitant pause - ‘researchers. This world is like a laboratory to us. This is a rare place, you see, because near-collisions between stars, of the kind that hurled this world into the dark, are rare. We are conducting experiments in low-temperature physics.’
‘You’re talking about absolute zero. Everybody knows you can’t reach absolute zero.’
‘Perhaps not. But the journey is interesting. The universe was hot when it was born,’ the ghost said gently. ‘Very hot. Since then it has expanded and cooled, slowly. But it still retains a little of that primal warmth. In the future, it will grow much colder yet. We want to know what will happen then. For example, it seems that at very low temperatures quantum wave functions - which determine the position of atoms - spread out to many times their normal size. Matter condenses into a new jelly-like form, in which all the atoms are in an identical quantum state, as if lased . . .’
Minda didn’t want to admit she understood none of this.
The ghost said, ‘You see, we seek to study matter and energy in configurations which might, perhaps, never before have occurred in all the universe’s history.’
She clambered over low, shattered walls, favouring hands and feet which ached with the cold. ‘That’s a strange thought.’
‘Yes. How does matter know what to do, if it has never done it before? By probing such questions we explore the boundaries of reality.’
She stopped, breathing hard, and gazed up at the hovering ghost. ‘Is that all you do, this physics stuff? Do you have a family?’
‘That is . . . complicated. More yes than no. Do you?’
‘We have cadres. I met my parents before I left home. They were there at my Naming, too, but I don’t remember that. Do you have music?’
‘More yes than no. We have other arts. Tell me why you are here.’
She frowned. ‘We have a right to be here.’ She waved an arm over the sky. ‘Some day humans are going to reach every star in the sky, and live there.’
‘Why?’
‘Because if we don’t, somebody else will.’
‘Is that all you do?’ the ghost asked. ‘Fly to the stars and build cities and comp
ete?’
‘No. We have music and poetry and other stuff.’ Defensively, she plodded on through deepening snow. ‘Soon we’ll change this world. We’re going to terraform it.’ She had to explain what that meant. ‘It will be a heroic project. It will require hard work, ingenuity and perseverance. Also we have brought creatures with us that are used to the cold. We found them on an ice moon a long way from our sun, a place called Port Sol. They have liquid helium for blood. Now we farm them. They can live here, even before the terraforming.’
‘How remarkable. But there are already creatures living here.’
‘We’ll put them in cases,’ said Minda. ‘Or zoos.’
‘We, my kind, can live here, on this cold world, without making it warm.’
‘Then you’ll have to leave,’ she snapped.
She reached the outskirts of the city.
It was a gridwork of foundations and low walls, all of it half-buried under a blanket of rock-hard water ice and frozen air. The buildings and roads seemed to follow a pattern of interlocking hexagons, quite unlike the cramped, organic, circle-based design of modern Conurbations on Earth, or the rectangular layout of many older, pre-Qax human settlements.
As she walked along what might once have been a street, the pain in her hands and feet seemed to be metamorphosing to an ominous numbness.
The ghost seemed to notice this. ‘You continue to lose heat,’ it said. ‘Shivering is no longer enough to warm you. Now your body is drawing heat back from your extremities to your core. Your limbs are stiffening—’
‘Shut up,’ she hissed.
She found a waist-high fragment of wall protruding from the layers of ice. She brushed at it with her glove; loose snow fell away, revealing a surface of what looked like simple brick. But it crumbled at her touch, perhaps frost-shattered.
She walked on into what might once have been a room, a space bounded by six broken walls. Though there were many rooms close by here - clustered like a honeycomb, closer than would have been comfortable for people - it was hard to believe the inhabitants of this place had been so different from humans.
She wondered what it had been like here, before.
Once, Snowball had been Earth-like. There had been continents, oceans of water, and life - based on an organic chemistry of carbon, oxygen and water, like Earth life, and it had worked to create an atmosphere of oxygen and nitrogen, not so dissimilar to Earth’s. And there had been people here: people who had built cities, and breathed air, and perhaps gazed at the stars.
But the long afternoon of this world had been disturbed.
Its sun had suffered a chance close encounter with another star. It was an unlucky, unlikely event, Minda knew; away from the Galaxy’s centre the stars were thinly scattered. As the interloper fell through the orderly heart of this world’s home system, there must have been immense tides, ocean waves that ground cities to dust, and earthquakes, a flexing of the rocky crust itself.
And then, at the intruder’s closest approach, Snowball was slingshot out of the heart of its system.
The home sun had receded steadily. Ice spread from polar caps across the land and the oceans, until much of the planet was clad in a thick layer of hardening water ice. At last the very air began to rain out of the sky, liquid oxygen and nitrogen running down the frozen river valleys to pool atop the vast ice sheets, forming a softer snow metres thick.
She wondered what had become of the people. Had they retreated underground into caves? Had they fled their planet altogether - perhaps even migrated to new worlds surrounding the wrecking star?
‘This world itself is not without inner heat,’ the ghost said softly. ‘The deep heart of a planet this size would scarcely notice the loss of its sun.’
‘The volcano,’ Minda said dully.
‘Yes. That is one manifestation. And vents of hot material on the spreading seabed have even kept the lower levels of the ocean unfrozen. We believe there may still be active life forms there feeding on the planet’s geothermal heat. But they must have learned to survive without oxygen . . .’
‘Do you have that on your world? Deep heat, water under the ice?’
‘Yes. But my world is small and cold; long ago it lost much of its inner heat.’
‘The world I come from is bigger than this frozen ruin,’ she said, spreading her arms wide. ‘It has lots of heat. And it is a double world. It has a Moon. I bet even the Moon is bigger than your world.’
‘Perhaps it is,’ the ghost said. ‘It must be a wonderful place.’
‘Yes, it is. Better than your world. Better than this.’
‘Yes.’
She was very tired. She didn’t seem to be hungry, or thirsty. She wondered how long it was since she had eaten. She stared at the frozen air around her, trying to remember why she had come here. An idea sparked, fitfully.
She got to her knees. She could feel the diamond grid of the suit’s heating elements press into the flesh of her legs. She swept aside the loose snow, but beneath there was only a floor of hard water ice.
‘There’s nothing here,’ she said dully.
‘Of course not,’ the ghost said gently. ‘The tides washed it all away.’
She began to pull together armfuls of loose snow. Much of it melted and evaporated, but slowly she made a mound of it in the centre of the room.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Maybe I can breathe this stuff.’ She knew little about the flitter’s systems. Maybe there was some hopper into which she could cram this frozen air.
But the ghost was talking to her again, its voice gentle but persistent, unwelcome. ‘Your body is continuing to manage the crisis. Carbohydrates which would normally feed your brain are now being burnt to generate more heat. Your brain, starved, is slowing down; your coordination is poor. Your judgement is unreliable.’
‘I don’t care,’ she growled, scraping at the frozen air.
‘Your plan is not likely to succeed. Your biology requires oxygen. But the bulk of this snow is nitrogen. And there are trace compounds which may be toxic to you. Does your craft contain filtering systems which—’
Minda drove her suited arm through the pile of air, scattering it in a cloud of vapour. ‘Shut up. Shut up.’
She walked back to the flitter. By now it felt as if she was floating, like a ghost herself.
The silver ghost told her about the world it came from. It was like Snowball, and yet it was not.
The ghosts’ world was once Earth-like, if smaller than Earth: blue skies, a yellow sun. But even as the ghosts climbed to awareness their sun evaporated, killed by a companion pulsar. It was a slower process than the doom of Snowball, but no less lethal. The oceans froze and life huddled inward; there was frantic evolutionary pressure to find ways to keep warm.
Then the atmosphere started snowing.
The ghosts had gathered their fellow creatures around them and formed themselves into compact, silvered spheres, each body barely begrudging an erg to the cold outside. Finally clouds of mirrored life forms rolled upwards. The treacherous sky was locked out - but every stray wisp of the planet’s internal heat was trapped.
Minda wondered if this was true, or just some kind of creation myth. But the murmuring words were comforting.
‘My home Conurbation is near a ruined city. A bit like this one. The ruin is an old pre-Occupation city. It was called Pah-reess. Did you know that?’
‘No. It must be a wonderful place.’
She found she had reached the flitter. She was so cold she wasn’t even shivering any more. It was almost comfortable.
She couldn’t lie on the ground. But she found a way to use bits of debris from the flitter, stuck in the ice, to prop herself up without having to lean on anything. After a time it seemed easier to leave her eyes closed.
‘Your body is losing its ability to reheat itself. You must find an external source of heat. You will soon drift into unconsciousness . . .’
‘I’m in my eighth cadre,’ Minda whispered. �
�You have to move cadres every two years, you know. But I was chosen for my new cadre. I had to pass tests. My best friend is called Janu. She couldn’t come with me. She’s still on Earth . . .’ She smiled, thinking of Janu.
She felt herself tilting. She forced open her eyes, frost crackling on her eyelashes. She saw that the pretty, silvered landscape was tipping up around her. She was falling over. It didn’t seem to matter any more; at least she could let her sore muscles relax.
Somewhere a voice called her: ‘Always protect your core heat. It is the most important thing you possess. Remember . . .’
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